


The Last of the Noble Kind

by Shaitanah



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-12
Updated: 2011-05-12
Packaged: 2017-10-19 07:42:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/198520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shaitanah/pseuds/Shaitanah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were three of them once. They shared four hearts and they saved the universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last of the Noble Kind

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Doctor Who belongs to the BBC. And I’m… not the BBC. Too bad.  
> A/N: This is very choppy, very weird and very much for heltja. Because you’re awesome.

**THE LAST OF THE NOBLE KIND**

 

Daleks burn in his dreams like firecrackers in the hands of a boisterous child, and when he wakes up from these dreams, he pretends not to remember anything, and there’s breakfast on the table, and Rose is smiling – and he recalls every time that they – she – had talked about this before, settling down, but it feels strange now as it is happening, and his lonely heart is

 

 _missing something_

 

\--

 

The young man wearing an old suit looks at Wilf like he doesn’t recognize him; and why should he? They have never met before. Only, with all that Wilf has been through, he is not so sure anymore.

 

\--

 

Sometimes Donna stops, just stops, which is rare for her, and all the more frightening for Shaun. He puts his arms around her and never asks any questions, but she answers all the same, It’s nothing. Just feel like I’m

 

 _missing something_

 

\--

 

Once he catches a cold, there is no convincing him that it is not lethal. He feels weakened by his one heart, and everything floats by (like he is in a public aquarium and all the luminous sea life is drifting in circles behind thick glass and he watches from the dark until his head begins to spin), and for a spell he believes he is dying until Rose basically yells at him, taking sharp breaths in between laughter because he is pathetic and fumbling and snotty and so alien. He is not infected with a cold. He is infected with humanity.

 

\--

 

The TARDIS floats by the edge of that parallel world once, never breaking the boundaries, but then she couldn’t if she tried, or maybe she could–

 

Somewhere in that world there is a man sporting his old face.

 

He never told any of them the real reason for not coming back for them. It’s not that he doesn’t care anymore; of course he does, of course he will. But he is brand new every time, and they are same old, and unless they’ve seen him through the change, there will always be

 

 _something missing_

 

\--

 

Shaun tried asking questions, but no one likes to have silence for an answer, so now he just waits patiently until Wilfred or Sylvia tell him everything. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t.

 

\--

 

“You’re not mad then, Doctor?” Wilf asks when they meet again. “That I killed you.”

 

“Rubbish, Wilf. Do I look dead to you?”

 

“You said–”

 

He smiles, youthful, jumpy, wearing a bowtie. His eyes look older than Stonehenge.

 

“You have no more killed me than I had killed her.”

 

\--

 

She sits by her grandfather’s telescope sometimes, looking at the stars, and she feels like a little girl lost in the big universe. At times like these she knows inherently that she is special. She just wishes she could remember

 

 _why_

 

\--

 

Hearts come in pairs for a reason. One heart is too easy to break.

 

Good thing you have mine then, Rose tells him and kisses him on the temple.

 

 _Temple_. He’s laughed at that one before.

 

\--

 

 _Now they are gone. All of them. Some you can still reach – as in pick up the phone and say hello once in a while, maybe even drop by for tea (you’d never do that unless you got an invitation just because there are far too many things on your mind to remember that, and when you miss people, you prefer to put some distance between you and them; otherwise, it’s not exactly_ missing _, is it?_ _). Others are gone forever. Like Donna. Like Rose. To you forever is just a word used to describe a very long period of time, but after so many ‘fairytale’ reunions you don’t really believe another one will come to pass._

 _You travel alone again, leaping from one planet to another, from past to future, and with each new point of destination you realize that space isn’t nearly as fascinating when there’s no one you could share it with._

 _You don’t ever stop until someone tells you that Time Lord Victorious is wrong and a gunshot rings in your ears._

\--

 

“Remember how you told me you could feel the planet turning?” Rose says. “Can you? Still?”

 

“Yes,” he tells her.

 

He imagines he can. Only it is slower somehow.

 

Or he can imagine.

 

\--

 

He doesn’t like to remember the people he’s been. It is too much like wallowing, and he never wallows. He is getting younger and he is getting older, and sometimes he feels like everyone knows something that he does not. It used to be the other way round.

 

\--

 

“That’s not funny.” Shaun pretends to be hurt when Donna snickers at the grimaces he has been making. He has just cut his hand, and she’s been applying some brilliant green to the wound. “It’s my hand. I love my hand. What if I lopped it off by accident?”

 

He grins as he says it, but Donna practically freezes, her face devoid of any expression. It lasts for a second, and then she comes back and laughs along. But Shaun hasn’t missed that second.

 

 _Neither has she._

 

\--

 

The face he sees one day in the mirror is the face of the old man from the Valiant. At least there is no dog food this time and no humiliation.

 

This is his second life as a human. This one has worked out.

 

\--

 

 _You never thought back to Bad Wolf Bay or the other you, the one you left to start a new life with Rose, the kind of life you’d never be able to lead. You dropped him there never to see him again because he was the part of you that you wouldn’t want to carry around._

 _Now that you are dying, he will be the last thing to remain of you, just as he remained when part of Donna died. Clever old Dalek, Caan was._

 

\--

 

Close your eyes, Rose whispers in his ear, her voice old, impossibly old. You’ve done it before.

 

Nine hundred years of life, and what a life it was! And what a spectacular ending. It was perhaps his greatest adventure, the one his original self never got to set out on.

 

\--

 

“I had a friend once,” he tells Amy. “A ginger friend. You know me, I like ginger friends.”

 

“Yeah, yeah, you’re compensating. Get to the point.”

 

“She was special. There were songs about her. But she forgot. She had to forget.”

 

There is more. She reads him easily like she always does.

 

“She died yesterday,” he says. “Well, not yesterday yesterday, just… you know, one of the yesterdays we’ve been through recently. Or was it tomorrow?”

 

She squeezes his hand and keeps quiet.

 

\--

 

He carries on their heartbeats through all of his lives. He is good with memories. He is good with everything, but especially with that.

 

 _May 12, 2011_


End file.
